How to install and configure WordPress 4.2.2 on CentOS 7

WordPress is an open source tool and a content management system written in PHP. It’s one of the easiest and powerful website creation tool for blogging.

It’s completely customizable and it can be used for almost anything as it has a large online community for support. It is also a great way to quickly get websites up and running. So in this article we will show you some simple steps on how to setup and start using WordPress.

For this example we will be using CentOS 7 as a base operating system with basic LAMP Stack environment installed on the cloud/server, that will almost cover all the prerequisites with the required PHP libraries. You can check out our tutorial on how to setup a LAMP stack on CentOS 7.

System Update

Before starting the installation, make sure that your system is up-to-date with the required updates and missing patches. The fully qualified domain name should be configured and you’ll need root access or super user privileges to process the installation and configuration.

You can update your operating system by executing the following linux command.

[root@centos-7 ~]# yum update

Database Setup for WordPress

Now we need to setup a separate database that will only be used for WordPress, with all it’s own user privileges.

Then login to your MySQL root user with following command, by providing the root user and password to start preparing its database.

[root@centos-7 ~]# mysql –u root -p

Creating a new Database

When you are logged in to your database server, it’s simple to create a new database using the following command on MariaDB.

Creating a new User

Assigning Privileges

Once you’ve already created the new database and user, we will now need to grant access to the user that was created to manage the databases.
Access privileges can be assigned to a new user by using following the command.

Now flush the changes that you’ve recently made to make them available to the current MariaDB process, afterwards execute the exit command to log out from MariaDB to go back to the shell’s main screen.

You will be redirected towards the web installation process for your WordPress.
Let’s choose your language settings and click Continue to move to the next step.

In the next step, fill out the required information in the fields and after doing it click “Install WordPress”.

Greetings!, You are now ready to use WordPress. All you need to do is type in your login details to start.

Conclusion

We have successfully installed and configured WordPress on our CentOS 7 cloud instance. You can now install the plug-in and themes that you want to have.
Also there are a lot of free plug-ins and themes developed by WordPress community.